by Tim Robinson
The development of the Aran fishery improved the condition of the islanders wonderfully, as others beside fishermen were employed in icing, packing, curing and handling the boxes of fish. All classes in the islands seemed to benefit, shopkeepers included, as larger earnings caused greater expenditure.
So it was fitting that a boat of the new Aran fleet should be named in memory of the priest who had piloted Aran out of the stormy gloom of the 1880s to within sight of the shores of the new century. But undoubtedly that was the way the tide was setting, as is clear when the Aran story is read in the context of the changing policies of British government.
The widespread “distress” of 1879, an exceptionally cold and wet year in the west of Ireland, and the wave of evictions that followed on failure to pay the rents, had been answered by the foundation of the Land League to fight for tenants’ rights. By the end of 1880 most of the Aran tenants were members of the local branch, whose treasurer was the Catholic curate Fr. Fahey. A famine had been averted, largely by the efforts of Dublin-based voluntary committees which collected funds world-wide. An American relief organization sent a frigate full of food and clothes, some of which were distributed by British warships around the inaccessible coasts and islands of the west; the Duke of Edinburgh’s visit to Cill Éinne, mentioned in Pilgrimage, was in this connection. Sir Henry Robinson sailed on some of these missions, and noted the contradictions of English policy:
The multifarious functions of the gunboats on the West coast were very puzzling to the islanders. The same vessels which came with food supplies for the people and departed with bonfires blazing on the beach in their honour would return in a few days with bailiffs, process servers and police to sweep the island bare for rents or rates. Then, after a pitched battle, away would go the bailiffs with their seizures, and back again would come the gunboats after a few weeks’ interval with tons of meal to help the people to tide over the further distress caused by its previous visit!
This deathly comedy was symptomatic of the Government’s contradictory impulses, faced simultaneously with the distress and the terrorism of the Land League, a menacing shadow behind Parnell’s Home Rule campaign at Westminster. The Aran outrages, culminating in the tumbling of the O’Flaherty’s cattle over the cliffs into the Atlantic, were just part of the Land War, and they happened to coincide with one aspect of the Government’s response, the Coercion Act of January 1881. Fr. O’Donoghue’s arrival in August of that year coincided with the other aspect, the Fair Rents Act, under which tenants gained the right to sell their leases and were protected against eviction except for non-payment of rent, and a Land Commission was instituted to adjudicate on fair rents.
Events in Aran answered to the polarities of these policies. Two islanders, including the secretary of the local Land League branch, were arrested on suspicion of complicity in the cliffing of the O’Flaherty cattle and were held without trial under the Coercion Act for four months; the island was so “disturbed” that the Galway JP could not come out to hear the rent-arrears cases pending, while the bailiff was shot at and had his sheep stolen. But Aran calmed down, like the rest of the country, after the “proclamation” of the Land League as an illegal organization, and with the growing willingness of tenants to try their luck with the Land Courts.
In fact so many cases were initiated that it was not until the summer of 1884 that a sitting was held in Cill Rónáin, at the request of Fr. O’Donoghue. The court heard a hundred and seventy cases, and in most of them rents were reduced by a third or more. In July 1886 another fifty tenants had their rents decreased by 40 per cent. A Land Commission barrister present on this occasion, Oliver J. Burke, was moved to write a book, The South Islands of Aran (London, 1887). This is the first comprehensive account of Aran’s natural features, ancient monuments, history and contemporary modes of life, but his main motive in writing it was “to direct the attention of those in power to the long neglected islands.”
Burke describes a typical session of the Land Court, with the Araners “squatting like Mahomedans’ to hear the solicitors’ arguments. On the one side are the legal representatives of Miss Digby and the Hon. Thomas Kenelm Digby St. Lawrence, second son of Thomas, twenty-ninth Baron, third Earl of Howth, and on the other, “Michael O Donel,” tenant. (“My father and his father were tenants on that holding since the Deluge at all events—couldn’t swear longer than that!”—“Do you swear that?”—“Well of coorse I couldn’t swear it out and out.”) The tenant’s holding consists of twenty-two acres of which five are nothing but rocks and stones; his rent is £3.18s.6d, the house and barn are his own, he pays £3 a year for a boatload of turf, he grew 80 stone of potatoes last year, but no grain. His stock consists of a cow and a veal calf, a horse, five sheep, eight lambs and two pigs. He keeps the wool for his family, and the stock last year realized £12; the sheep go to Ennistymon fair in Co. Clare, the cattle and pigs to Galway on the mailboat, at a freight of 2s 6d for calves and is for pigs; he was sixteen days weather-bound in Galway after last February’s fair. Next Mr. Thompson of Clonskea Castle, Co. Dublin, is sworn in. The total rental of the three islands, he explains, is £2067, and has hardly varied since the beginning of the century. The tenants have manure and seaweed free of charge. Seaweed was very valuable in 1866 when £2577 worth of kelp was made, at £5 a ton, but now no kelp is made owing to the fall in price. The sub-commissioners then inspect the farm, and in due course the rent is reduced by 40 per cent to £2.7s. 6d.
But, asks Mr. Burke, can any reduction of rent or even security of tenure really improve the islanders’ condition? What is needed is schools to instruct them in deep-sea fishing, navigation, shipbuilding and net-making, as well as improved piers and a telegraphic link with Galway so that the steamer can come out and collect the catch. The people are too poor to buy first-class boats. He quotes a letter from the rector, Mr. Kilbride, dated December 1886:
Men’s wages vary. No constant work. Spring and the seaweed gathering the chief harvests for the labourer, who seldom has more than four month’s work in the year, so it is a necessity for him to get gardens on hire. Until last year or the year before he got 1s to 1s 6d with his diet in the spring, at harvest about is with his diet, three meals in the day, bread and tea for breakfast etc. When there is a hurry at seaweeding time he used to get 2s 6d and diet, but this only lasts a week twice in the year…. What kept the poor rate down last year and this was the amount of relief given out. Thompson laid out £140 on a road and £136 on seed potatoes. Sir John Barrington has given me upward of £100 for the object, and this year he gave me £80 or £90 for seed potatoes and £120 for relief and also money to assist emigration and to buy turf. The people will suffer terribly for want of fuel. The potato crop is all gone. No fish whatever taken. Any further information you want I will freely give.
Indeed the years between 1884 and 1887 were hard on the islands, because of failures of the potato crop. When Fr. O’Donoghue’s representations to the Government produced nothing, he appealed to the public through the Freeman’s Journal, and was generously answered by private donors, among them a lawyer, George Shee, of Ipswich in England.
It was from this stony-broke community, in 1886, that the Galway authorities attempted to squeeze out nearly £2000. The sum was made up of arrears of rates unpaid since 1882, plus a communal fine of £452, being the compensation that had been paid out to owners of stock and goods destroyed in the Land War, and another £622 for the cost of the extra police force sent in 1881. The rates collector was a Frank Kelly, butcher, of An Spidéal; Antoine Powell tells us how he fared:
It was not long before he was made aware that every mother’s son in the islands would be out against him if he came gathering rates. So he had to ask the authorities to provide an escort before he could go to the islands. The Government gave him the defence force, but no boat owner between An Spidéal and Galway was agreeable to renting him a boat. In the end he had to put off the rate collection until the next year. In April 1887 Kelly managed to ren
t a boat from a servant of Sir Valentine Blake’s, and the Government agreed to provide a warship to bring him and his guard to the island and to tow the boat for the distrained beasts. On the 26th of May the warship Orwell sailed from Galway with Frank Kelly and his escort of fifteen RIC men under the command of a sergeant … It was evening by the time they reached Árainn Mhór, and so they decided not to start posting notices until the next day. The police escort was landed for the night, but Kelly and the sergeant stayed on board.
At six o’clock of the 27th, they both came ashore in a rowboat. While the sergeant was going up to the barracks for the defence force, the rowboat with Kelly pulled back from the quay because a noisy crowd was gathering. When he saw two constables on the quay he decided to land immediately, but as he was getting out of the boat he was hit by a stone. The man who threw the stone was arrested straight away and when the rest of the force arrived he was taken to the barracks. Then Kelly and his escort went along the road westwards from Cill Rónáin posting up bills, with about a hundred people following them. After they had gone about two miles they turned back, the crowd still following. Outside the barrack in Cill Rónáin another stone was thrown and again the man who threw it was arrested. As soon as he was under lock and key they went on towards Cill Éinne. But when they got as far as An Charcair Mhór the villagers came out to meet them, women carrying stones in the forefront. The sergeant halted the police, who were drawn up in a square around Kelly, and went forward to talk to the crowd. While he was doing so Kelly panicked, broke out of his escort, and set off at a run for Cill Rónáin. When the crowd saw him running they burst past the sergeant and those that were not able to get through the police square leaped over the walls and followed Kelly, throwing stones at him and at the police. At last the police caught up with Kelly again, a shot was fired in the air as a signal to the Orwell to launch its boats, and the sergeant threatened to fire on the crowd if any more stones were thrown. Kelly and one constable had head-wounds, another constable was wounded in the back, and the rest, though they had been hit, were uninjured.
After that Kelly resigned his post and nobody was appointed in his place. In 1890 the Council offered to waive the islands’ arrears if the government was satisfied to do so. In 1891 the government agreed to wipe out the debts part from the £452 fine imposed because of the Land War crimes.
Eventually the fine was paid, at the urging of a later parish priest, Fr. Farragher, and after many visits from the sheriff and the RIC. Nevertheless An Charcair Mhór was a famous victory, and a song was written about it. A few lines about a huge islander nicknamed “the Wren” are still remembered:
Tháinig Kelly ag cur cíosa
Ar mhuintir Árainn Mhór,
Ach bhuail An Dreoilín mullán eibhir air
Ag gabhail sios An Charcair Mhór.
[Kelly came to put the rates / On the folk of Árainn Mhór, / But the Wren hit him with a granite boulder / Going down the Carcair Mhór.]
It was the pecks of countless wrens like this that eventually forced the British Government to act on the condition of the west.
The Cill Mhuirbhigh barracks was closed in 1887 and the extra police withdrawn, and the latter years of Fr. O’Donoghue’s incumbency were relatively peaceful and productive. He had long been agitating for better school buildings, but though grants had been forthcoming for this purpose since 1882 no sites were made available until some years later—it is said that the agent Thompson refused to facilitate the education of “papist brats” until the Viceroy, Lord Carnarvon, intervened, having heard of this during a visit to the islands. By 1889 the neat, slated schools had been built, and teachers’ residences were in construction. In 1890 Fr. O’Donoghue petitioned the Government for a regular steamer service from Galway, an idea he had been pursuing unsuccessfully since his earliest days in the islands, and in the following year the steamer Duras of the Galway Bay Steamboat Co. began thrice-weekly sailings. This link was to be the key element in the Government-assisted development of the fisheries in the next few years.
The Congested Districts Board, set up under a Land Act of 1891, was the Government’s instrument in its belated undertaking of responsibility for the economic welfare of the west-of-Ireland peasantry. As M.L. Micks, the CDB’s first secretary, wrote in his history of the organization:
The circumstances of these tenants, including the utter impossibility of their raising themselves by their own unaided effort, were recognised by Mr. Arthur Balfour in 1891, and he has the credit of being the first British Minister who acknowledged in a practical way that the universal poverty of the West of Ireland was a disgrace to British government.
The “congested districts” comprised those areas, mainly of the Atlantic seaboard from Donegal to Cork, whose resources were inadequate for their populations, and were initially defined as those Poor Law Electoral Divisions in which the total rateable value per head of population was less than thirty shillings. By this or any other definition of inadequate means the Aran Islands had a call on the CDB, and since the development of fisheries was the area of expertise of some of the initial members of the Board, it was inevitable that it would soon take Aran under its wing. In fact Cill Rónáin with its steamer link now had an advantage over comparable ports in Connemara and elsewhere, for fish could be brought to the rail-head in Galway in much better condition by steamer than, for instance, by cart from Roundstone. The traditional long-line fishing for cod, ling and glassan was encouraged by the Board’s guaranteed prices, loans for purchasing better equipment, and the introduction of Scottish methods of fish-curing. The Rev. W.S. Green, who was Chief Fisheries Inspector as well as a Board member, was convinced that a spring mackerel fishery by drift-netting could be established in Galway Bay, and the Board offered bounties to the Arklow boats to come and prove it. It also undertook to subsidize the steamer company to transport the catch, arranged net-mending classes, had a hulk full of Norwegian ice moored in Cill Éinne bay, instituted a telegraph link by which contact could be maintained with markets, and in 1900 opened a boat-building yard. The transformation of the seaward aspect of Cill Rónáin, described in my first volume, was the sign of these forward-looking times.
Micks, in his history of the CDB, does not mention Fr. O’Donoghue and it is unlikely that the PP’s representations to the government were crucial to these developments. What Sir Henry Robinson’s anecdote about the telegram shows, though, is that the priest was a man of the world who thoroughly understood the opportunities afforded by the new governmental policy (often satirized as “trying to kill Home Rule by kindness”), and was on familiar terms with the officials charged with executing it. To the islanders, for whom the Government spelt gunboats and constables, his powers of leverage must have seemed heroic, if not supernatural.
So it was indeed the O’Donoghue decade that put Aran in tow to the way of the world—and only a few years after he had gone, the writers and artists and Irish-language enthusiasts who flocked to the newly accessible islands were lamenting a simplicity that was being lost even as they discovered it. Synge expresses the dilemma of “development” concisely:
One feels … that it is part of the misfortune of Ireland that nearly all the characteristics which give colour and attractiveness to Irish life are bound up with a social condition that is near to penury, while in countries like Brittany the best external features of the local life—the rich embroidered dresses, for instance, or the carved furniture—are connected with a decent and comfortable social condition.
Was there any other way out of the miseries of that time? Could it be that Fr. O’Donoghue’s memorial marks a historical juncture, from which there was another road, not taken? Given the universality of the changes then impending on the island, I doubt if any purely local way forward would have been viable. Perhaps, though, now that the whole world finds that the highway of development ends in a squalid cul-de-sac from which we will have to back out with much difficulty, Aran will live to see a re-evaluation of that quality it still
holds within itself, just over the wall, as it were, from Cill Rónáin. On winter evenings in the 1970s I occasionally attended, out of a flickering sense of civic duty, public meetings in the community hall. Debate sometimes shrank away into wrangles between two personages I came to think of as the delegate from the future and the delegate from the past, the latter a talking archive of discouraging precedents, the former’s visions fuddled by drink. Nevertheless valuable work was done by a handful of islanders, and some intermittently effective structures representing the community to itself and the outside world were set up. But what I chiefly remember from those tedious sessions, is my slipping out and standing at the door of the hall to watch the moon, that fourth, aloof and elusive Aran Island, float up from the dimly gleaming rim of crag behind the town.